How to sell your house without an agent in NSW

Is it legal to sell your own house in NSW?

Yes. The licensing requirements in New South Wales apply to people who sell property on behalf of someone else. An owner selling their own property is not acting as an agent and does not need a licence.

What you cannot avoid is the legal work. A licensed conveyancer or a solicitor must prepare the Contract for Sale, and in New South Wales that contract has to exist before the property is advertised. That is a legal requirement rather than a formality, and it is the single most common reason a private sale campaign starts late.

Nothing else about the process is reserved to agents. You are permitted to list the property, hold inspections, speak to buyers, and negotiate the price yourself.

What has to be ready before you advertise

Section 63 of the Property and Stock Agents Act 2002 makes it an offence to market a residential property before a Contract for Sale has been prepared. The contract must be available from the moment the property is offered for sale, which means the legal work comes first and the photography comes second.

Your conveyancer assembles the contract and the documents that have to be attached to it, which the Contract for Sale in NSW covers in detail. The list depends on the property, and your conveyancer will tell you which apply to yours.

• A current title search and the plan for the lot
• A section 10.7 planning certificate from the council
• A sewerage service diagram from the water authority
• Strata documents, where the property is in a strata or community scheme
• Any swimming pool certificate of compliance or non-compliance
• Disclosure of anything the law requires you to disclose about the property

What the work actually involves

Once the contract exists, a private sale campaign is a sequence of practical tasks rather than a specialist skill. The parts that take real time are the marketing preparation and the buyer contact.

Preparation means presenting the property properly and writing the listing. The listing copy has to be accurate, because anything you claim in an advertisement can become an issue later.

Buyer contact means answering enquiries promptly and holding inspections. Enquiries arrive at unpredictable hours and go cold quickly, so responsiveness matters more than polish. Open homes are usually run over a set half hour on a weekend, with a record kept of who attended.

Then come the offers. Assessing an offer is not only about the number: the deposit, the settlement period, and any conditions all change what the offer is worth to you. This is the stage most vendors worry about, and it is a contained process once you know what you are looking at.

You cannot list on Domain or realestate.com.au yourself

This is the single biggest practical constraint on a private sale in Australia, and most people discover it after they have decided to sell.

Domain and realestate.com.au accept listings only from approved agencies and platforms. Neither takes a listing directly from an individual owner, no matter how the property is presented or how much you are willing to pay. There is no consumer upload path.

It matters because of where buyers actually look. The overwhelming majority of residential property searching in Australia happens on those two portals. A property that is not on them is invisible to most of the people who would otherwise have considered it, and a smaller audience means fewer competing buyers. Since the largest influence on the final price is usually having more than one interested buyer at the same time, portal access is not a marketing detail. It is the campaign.

There are three ways around it. You can list only on for sale by owner websites, which reach a fraction of the buyer pool. You can pay a listing service that uploads on your behalf and leaves the rest to you. Or you can use a private sale platform, where the portal listing forms part of a package alongside the photography and the rest of the campaign.

OwnAgent is one of those platforms. It lists on both major portals as part of the marketing package, for a flat platform fee of $999 plus the package you choose.

Do not economise on the photography

Professional photography is not a nice addition to a campaign. It is the campaign, for the first few seconds of every buyer's decision.

Buyers scroll listings on a phone. The first photograph determines whether your property is opened or passed, and that judgement is made in about a second, before a single word of the description is read. Photographs taken on a phone are recognisable as such at a glance, and they signal a property that has not been prepared properly. The buyer draws that conclusion about the house, not about the photographer.

A professional shoot costs somewhere between $400 and $900 in Sydney, and produces fifteen to twenty images with the exposure and the lines corrected. Set against a sale price in the hundreds of thousands or the millions, it is the highest-leverage money spent in the entire process.

A floorplan belongs in the same category. Listings with one attract measurably more enquiry, because buyers can tell whether the layout works before they give up a Saturday morning to find out. Where you do not know the internal dimensions, they are measured as part of preparing the floorplan.

What it costs to sell privately

The largest single cost in a traditional sale is agent commission, charged as a percentage of the price. On a $1.5 million sale at 2 percent that is $30,000, and many agencies charge more. What agents charge in NSW sets out how the rates and the agency agreement work. Marketing is usually billed separately, on top of the commission.

Selling privately removes the commission but not the other costs. You still pay for the legal work, and you still need marketing that puts the property in front of buyers on the major portals.

• Conveyancing, billed directly by your conveyancer or solicitor
• Government searches and certificates, charged at cost
• Photography, a floorplan, and the listing itself
• Portal listing fees, which are how most buyers will find the property
• A signboard and any printed material for inspections

The steps, in order

A private sale in New South Wales follows a predictable sequence. Doing these out of order is what causes most delays, and in the case of advertising before the contract exists, it is also an offence.

• Engage a conveyancer or solicitor and instruct them to prepare the Contract for Sale
• Decide your price expectation and your minimum, before any buyer asks
• Prepare the property, then book photography and a floorplan
• Publish the listing once the contract is ready, and place a signboard
• Hold inspections, and keep a record of every enquiry and attendee
• Assess offers on price and terms together, then negotiate
• Accept an offer, and let the two conveyancers handle exchange
• Complete settlement, usually six weeks after exchange

Where private sales go wrong

Private sales rarely fail for the reason people expect. The problem is almost never the vendor being unable to talk to buyers.

The most common failure is price. A property listed above what the market will pay collects no offers, goes stale, and then sells for less than it would have if it had been priced correctly at launch. Comparable sales in the same suburb, in the last few months, are the only evidence worth weighting, and pricing a home in NSW covers how to find and adjust them.

The second is starting the campaign before the contract is ready, which either delays the launch or pushes the vendor into advertising when they are not permitted to.

The third is buyer competition. The strongest position a vendor can be in is more than one interested buyer at the same time, and that position is created by the campaign rather than by negotiating tactics. A listing that reaches a narrow audience produces one buyer, and one buyer sets the price.

Selling while the property is tenanted

A tenanted property can be sold, and it is common. The Residential Tenancies Act sets out what you owe the tenant, and the requirements are specific rather than vague.

You must give the tenant 14 days written notice of your intention to sell, counted from the day after they receive it. Inspections require 48 hours notice each time, and are limited to twice in any week. Photographs that show the tenant's possessions cannot be published without their written consent.

None of this prevents a sale. It does mean the campaign has to be planned around the notice periods rather than compressed into a week, which selling a tenanted property sets out in full.